Mission & Vision

CNAP's mission is to improve resilience in California and Nevada by providing decision makers usable climate information through integrating cutting edge physical and social science.

Focus

CNAP, California Nevada Applications Program, has a long history of providing cutting edge climate science to stakeholders in the region. Originally the program began as CAP in 1999, under the leadership of Dan Cayan and Kelly Redmond, and in 2011 the team expanded into Nevada and became CNAP. CNAP core priority areas have been and continue to be water resources, natural resources and coastal resources.

Over the years CNAP has worked closely with California Energy Commission and has taken a leading role in the three completed and now 4th ongoing, California Climate Assessments. In addition the team has collaborated with California Department of Water Resources in several of their climate focused efforts. CNAP also has work closely with Fire agencies throughout the West to better understand fire behavior, institutional knowledge of fire fighters, and future projections of wildfire. Since expanding to Nevada, CNAP worked with Great Basin tribes to understand barriers to climate data and helped develop a resilience plan with Washoe County. More recently CNAP is working with Southern Nevada Water Authority, Science Climate Alliance – South Coast, and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on climate related projects.

Since the inception of the California Nevada Drought Early Warning System (CA/NV DEWS) CNAP has worked closely with the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) to coordinate communication and to research topics surrounding drought and water resources.

CNAP program model highlights the outcomes, or what the type of products it produces including scientific journal articles, reports, stakeholder workshops, and mentoring early career scientists. The program model also describes the short-term, near-term and long-term goals for the program.

Decision Support Tools

Water Storage Tracking in California: Mike Dettinger tracks water storage in the Sierra Nevada, in real time, by combining daily storage updates from 28 reservoirs (red dots on the map to the right) with snow-pack totals for the Sierra. Understanding the combination of storage in snow-pack and reservoir is important, because snow-pack acts as a natural reservoir in CA that holds water during the cooler months and releases it in the warmer drier months

Sea Level Tracking This page shows a figure with predicted and observed sea level heights for a recent period.

Historical Precipitation Percentiles: This figure shows the time series of precipitation percentiles over the last 10 years as a function of timescale (vertical axis) for three California climate divisions.

Calclim: Climate monitoring and data access for the state of California

ABOUT OUR ORGANIZATION

Americans’ health, security and economic wellbeing are tied to climate and weather. Every day, we see communities grappling with environmental challenges due to unusual or extreme events related to climate and weather. In 2017, the United States experienced a record-tying 16 climate- and weather-related disasters where overall costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. Combined, these events claimed 362 lives, and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted, costing more than $306 billion. Businesses, policy leaders, resource managers and citizens are increasingly asking for information to help them address such challenges.